Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Energy Policy: The president falsely claims that the jobs created by the pipeline from Canada would be but a "blip relative to the need," ignoring his own State Department and the unions that support him.

At the rate President Obama is going, he may claim that building the Keystone XL pipeline will actually cost jobs. In an interview with the New York Times last Saturday, he argued that the best estimate is 2,000 initial construction jobs followed by no more than an additional 100 jobs, a mere "blip."

The newspaper's transcript of the interview showed Obama chuckling dismissively as he made his point.

Then on Tuesday, in a jobs speech in Chattanooga, the president ratcheted that number downward. "They keep on talking about this — an oil pipeline coming down from Canada that's estimated to create about 50 permanent jobs. That's not a jobs plan."

No, Mr. President, it's part of a plan to boost an economy that will create private-sector jobs, as your own State Department has told you.

After five years of review and many studies, the State Department found that "including direct, indirect and induced effects, the proposed (Keystone) project would potentially support approximately 42,100 average annual jobs across the United States over a one- to two-year construction period."

Now, if the House of Representatives was actually serious about the Obama administration's serial perjurious testimony, it might actually do something drastic. Like defund Obamacare and kill any talk of Amnesty. But I'm guessing that, despite this report, nothing at all will change.

House Republicans released a report Wednesday and “formally accused” Attorney General Eric Holder of misleading Congress with his “deceptive” testimony back in May, Fox News reported.

After reporting their findings, lawmakers sent a letter to President Obama saying they have “grave concerns” about Holder and called for a “change in leadership” at the Department of Justice.

Holder, testifying before the Judiciary Committee on May 15 on DOJ leaks investigations, said he “knew nothing” about the “potential prosecution” of Fox News reporter James Rosen, when actually, it was reported later, Holder himself approved the warrant for Rosen’s email communications.

“With regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something that I have ever been involved, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy,” Holder then testified to the Judiciary Committee.

However, a House committee investigation concluded Holder’s testimony was “deceptive and misleading.”

Translation: Holder lied under oath, which -- last I checked -- was a crime.

QOTD: "Sometimes you just have to do what is right. If we don’t fight for this, then MSNBC has won, Obama and his Chicago thuggery have won, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and their dishonest cram-down-our-throats tactics have won, and who we are as a party (or as a nation) may never be the same. There is a time for compromise, and that time has passed. The President didn’t compromise when he forced his will on the American people with this bloated takeover of the health care industry. We cannot compromise as we fight back." --Lisa Mathews

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

It's an iron law of nature as certain as the one about an angel getting its wings every time a bell rings or a snowstorm blanketing the area every time Al Gore comes to town to remind the carbon puffing infidels about Global Warming; every time Obama gives a speech, a thousand businesses go out of business.

On July 24th, to celebrate Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Day, Obama delivered yet another economic speech in which he castigated Republicans in Congress for the sequester that he proposed, promised big economic benefits for the entire country from Green Energy and Illegal Immigration and promised to spend every one of his remaining days trying to help working people; at least those days when he isn't on the golf course, on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard or delivering useless speeches.

An Obama speech is a familiar quality that even the scribblers whose limbs once tingled at the touch of the teleprompter have developed a callous contempt for its reflexively dishonest "Let me be clears" and the infinite "I's" that roll off its assembly line speechmakers.

An economics speech, a creature that Barack Obama has been unleashing from his political zoo on the taxpayers, lawmakers and layabouts since his post-election days in 2008 of pretending to be president complete with an imaginary seal with the motto "Vero Possumus” (which can be translated very loosely as "God Help Us All"), is an entirely familiar breed.

It's an FDR-on-crack assemblage of crackpot social plans masquerading as economic plans and homey testaments to American exceptionalism wrapped around bankrupt Euro ideas about how to run a country into the ground. And in the year 2013, the whole thing smells like last year's leftovers.

99 percent of you have no earthly idea who or what a Doug Mataconis is (if that actually is his real name). Nor should any of you care, other than the fact that his website is home to dozens, if not hundreds, of woefully confused progressives. In his latest excretion, Mataconis takes Ted Cruz and fellow conservatives to task for daring to fight Obamacare.

Cruz’s advice requires anyone who follows it to ignore political reality to a significant degree. For one thing, 2013 is not 1995, and the Republican Party, especially in its Congressional incarnation, is not viewed nearly as positively today as it was nearly 20 years ago.

Gee, Doug, ya think it has anything to do with the fact that the Republican Party in its current state stands for absolutely nothing? Tell me, Doug, what does it stand for? Lower taxes? No. Secure borders? No. Investigating the Obama administration's unprecedented series of scandals? No.

Of course the Republican Party is unpopular. It spends its energy fighting the same conservative base that brought it to power in 2010 in an unprecedented beatdown of Democrats nationwide rather than the Marxist Left that is Cloward-Pivenizing the country into bankruptcy. And instead of embracing fiscal conservatism, the Tea Party, and First Principles, it repudiates them.

Its marble-mouthed "leaders" like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have all the charisma of your average houseplant.

So, Sherlock Mataconis, if you're looking for reasons that the GOP is unpopular, perhaps you could add one (the far left Democrat kook movement) and one (the conservative base) and you'll come up with two (the answer).

More importantly, though, Cruz is making the same mistake that Republicans made in 1995, and which they have made several times already in the four years that President Obama has been President. He believes that by taking the Federal Government to the brink, they can somehow turn the tables and make the public believe that it’s President Obama who’s at fault for the fact that the Government has been, or is about to be shut down. They tried in in the Spring of 2011 when the government was about to run out of money, they tried it in July and August of that year with the battle over the debt ceiling, and they’ve tried it several times since then.

How many shutdowns did the Republicans pull off? Oh, that's right: none. So comparing a shutdown to a Boehner surrender is like comparing monkeys to cashews.

Let me get this straight: the GOP passes a CR that funds the entire government except for the wildly unpopular and destructive Obamacare cluster -- and Obama blocks it, shutting down the government.

In reality, the GOP will be viewed as heroes by roughly 60 percent of the electorate.

Best of all, Obama will be on the hook for actually making a decision: (a) either shutting down the cancerous federal leviathan that grows in good times and bad; or (b) funding the federal government and starving Obamacare.

Either way, Republicans win.

So if you're relying on Doug Mataconis for political advice, I'd recommend using a Ouija Board instead. It's bound to offer more reliable counsel and it has a better chance of outwitting Ted Cruz than Doug ever had.

This President could give a damn about serious investigations regarding the scandals swirling around his administration. And then his lackeys go on TV, including Fox News Sunday, and tell us there's no evidence? Their people plead the Fifth. The Attorney General doesn't conduct investigations.

And what's necessary is for the Republicans in the House to get their act together.

We don't need five separate House committees investigating Benghazi. We need one Special Investigative Commitee -- with former U.S. assistant attorneys and other types of prosecutors, who are serious people and have the resources necessary full-time to pursue these matters -- and put the information out on the table.

Same with the Internal Revenue Service investigation. We've got committees tripping over one another, claiming jurisdiction. Once again, we need experts, we need to pursue these things with a Special Investigative Committee.

And then the pressure builds for a Special Prosecutor. Even though Holder won't want to appoint one, over time enough information will come out where it will become necessary.

The President of the United States -- it's been almost a year -- will still not tell the American people what he was doing for eight-and-a-half hours after our consulate was attacked in Benghazi...

The President uses his word phony [to describe his scandals]. It's actually a perfect word for him, because his speeches are phony, his promises are phony, his economy is phony, the whole damn thing is phony.

Let me tell you something... from my point of view, once more, the Speaker of the House, he's in charge of organizing these investigations... and he won't. They're flopping around, they're navel-gazing... because they don't think there's anything political in this. They're playing rope-a-dope, they're playing it safe, they want to push through the next election.

Boehner wants to remain Speaker, Cantor Majority Leader... the point is, the fact is, if they'd been running effective investigations, one committee -- a joint committee -- with some of the sharpest, toughest individuals we know investigating Benghazi, we'd be to the bottom of this already.

Same with the IRS scandal. The president should be served with an interrogatory. It's been done before...

What is everybody talking about? Weiner's weiner, for God's sakes... The Trayvon Martin case, that went on for a month.

Meanwhile, we have an Internal Revenue Service that was illegally attacking United States citizens because of their politics, because of their political viewpoints, because of their religion. I mean, for crying out loud, if that doesn't raise an uproar... we have four Americans dead and the President of the United States is running all over the country and refuses to tell the American people what the hell he was doing for eight-and-a-half hours. I think he was sleeping. But he won't say.

We have this NSA -- massive gathering of telephone numbers -- basically nationalizing the phone companies' records as if that's going to fight terrorism...

[On Christie's support of the NSA program and attacks on Rand Paul] ...Maybe this Chris Christie can get in front of these 9/11 families and tell us how this NSA program would have saved a single life or prevented a single terrorist attack. You know how these terrorists got into this country? The border wasn't secure and they overstayed their visas. What is Chris Christie's position on that?

Christie's weak on Amnesty. So I think it's a mistake for him to use 9/11 to attack who he believes will be his political opponents in a Republican primary...

We conservatives have been fighting against the Republican establishment for half a century, whether they take the form of Chris Christie, or Romney... or Gerald Ford or Richard Nixon.

This country needs to move in a new direction, economically, Constitutionally, when it comes to our Bill of Rights.

QOTD: "For several years, Republican establishment types and their allies in the press have mocked conservatives for wanting an all or nothing strategy. They’ve said we have to be willing to compromise. So Mike Lee proposes a plan to fund the government except for the discretionary funding for Obamacare. The reaction of GOP leaders? They only want to support a plan that fully repeals Obamacare.

Conservatives have done what the GOP establishment wants. And now they attack us for compromising instead of going all or nothing?

We inch ever closer to a third party as Republican Leaders commit suicide by lie. The leadership willing to fight the base to pass a terrible immigration reform bill won’t lift a finger to fight against Obamacare.

The best chance we, as conservative activists have, is to deliver the third party from within by picking off Republican establishment leaders in primaries. From Matt Bevin to Milton Wolf to Larry Rhoden to Rob Maness to so many others, it is time to disrupt the GOP in a last ditch effort to save it from itself." --Erick Erickson

Monday, July 29, 2013

History: Few comparisons have been as odious as the one offered by the president linking one of the great mass murderers of history to one of America's Founding Fathers and authors of our liberty.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were mortal and inhumane enemies who joined civilization after their hideous barbarism was defeated.

They renounced their former brutality, acknowledged their guilt and shame, and became our strongest allies as they genuinely embraced liberty and democracy. They did not forget their past. They repudiated it.

Vietnam has never repudiated its past while celebrating a faux victory over an American enemy that was never defeated on the battlefield but only in the halls of a Congress that abandoned an ally and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

President Obama met with his Vietnamese counterpart, President Truong Tan Sang, last Thursday in the same Oval office where LBJ picked bombing targets in a war he micromanaged into futility. The 44th president conveniently forgot Vietnamese history and slandered ours by linking a founder of our democracy, Thomas Jefferson, to the mass murderer Ho Chi Minh.

Karl Rove has a piece at FoxNews titled "Republicans must resist game of chicken with president over ObamaCare." In it, the establishment's favorite political guru dispenses bad advice to grassroots conservatives, based on the assumption that defunding the health care law on a spending bill "won't work."

...Rove is basically saying, Look, 98 or 99 percent of ObamaCare is auto-pilot spending; but a CR is about something completely different: annually appropriated spending. Ergo, you can't stop more than 1 or 2 percent of ObamaCare on a CR.

That would be a valid argument, if its basic premise were true. But it isn't. What the "Don't Fund It" coalition (led by Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and others) is proposing is that all ObamaCare funding -- including auto-pilot spending -- be cut off by means of a legislative "rider" containing specific prohibitory language forbidding any ObamaCare funding from occurring. This rider would be attached to the CR, widely regarded as a "must-pass" measure...

...This language is clear and comprehensive. Enacting it would bring ObamaCare to a complete and permanent halt...

Karl Rove is a nitwit whose ignorance is only exceeded by the tools who continue to put funds in his chubby little fingers. His "Crony Capitalist Republicanism" wasn't popular in the Bush era and it is certainly even less popular now.

He has no earthly idea how much energy the Republican Party would garner from the grassroots by taking a stand and actually fighting on principle, win or lose.

Good News: The Senate Minority "Leader" -- who hides in the shadows and orchestrates surrenders while pretending to be a conservative -- will face a well-deserved challenge in Kentucky. Those Constitutional conservatives who are sick and tired of Marxist-Lite policies would do well to consider supporting Matt Bevin.

Bevin [isn't very] pleased with today’s congressional Republicans. “Of 535 members of Congress, I would bet there are two dozen truly conservative people,” he estimates. “We are not being well lead in either the House or the Senate in the Republican party.” He does admire Senator Rand Paul (who has endorsed McConnell), and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, and, perhaps most of all, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. “I love Ted Cruz,” he enthuses. Indeed, “someone like a Ted Cruz” would be his dream pick for a Republican Senate leader to replace McConnell. “I think he could handle it. It would be refreshing.”

In a heated primary, the outspokenly conservative Cruz beat Texas lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, who was the GOP-establishment favorite. The Cruz team slammed Dewhurst as someone who would “go along to get along.” During his relatively short tenure in the Senate so far, Cruz has shown himself more willing to operate as a conservative outsider than a team player. That’s the kind of role Bevin envisions for himself if he is sent to Washington.

Another politician Bevin admires is Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.). “Thomas Massie is awesome — I love Thomas,” Bevin gushes. “He’s one of the nine guys who had the cojones to vote against John Boehner” for House speaker, he explains. Massie might not share Bevin’s passion for replacing McConnell, though. Earlier this year, asked about the possibility of a tea-party challenge to McConnell, Massie told Kentucky radio station WFPL: “My advice to people who are frustrated with Washington is that there’s probably a better way to spend your time, effort, money, blood, sweat, and tears than trying to have Senator McConnell unelected. I think there are a lot better chances and better use of your time in terms of changing Washington, D.C.”

Bevin is a veteran and a businessman. This is his first time running, but he's been politically active for decades. His conservative background led to the Madison Project's recent endorsement.

They said Ted Cruz couldn't beat David Dewhurst. They were wrong. They said Mike Lee and Rand Paul couldn't win. They were wrong. If you have a couple of spare bucks, consider helping Bevin.

As if the tools in Praetorian Media haven't been embarrassed enough over the past four-plus years -- having to cover for their increasingly scandal-ridden failure in the White House -- their latest gaffe really is hilariously unhinged.

...Only one problem: that picture wasn’t take at the North Pole, it was taken over 300 miles away.

You see while they were busy lecturing the faithful, they forgot the one teensy-eeensy little detail about the source of this photo. It is from camera on top of the sea ice, and sea ice isn’t static, it moves. In fact according to the University of Washington who manages and tracks these floating cameras and weather stations, while they started out near the North Pole, they aren’t anywhere close to it now. See the map:

Oh, my. Well that certainly is embarrassing. But the hapless Leftists didn't just stop there.

...Of course, like the Gore Reality Bots, all of these “journalists” also missed the simple fact that the photo was taken hundreds of miles away where the buoy had drifted to. They could easily check this themselves with about 30 seconds of work, visiting the source for the photo here...

...And as of today the “North Pole melt crisis” seems to be over...

...And, of course, photos actually taken at the North Pole by the US navy show that such open water in a regular occurrence in the past:

If it wasn't for global warming, maybe the kooks at HuffPo would have some ice to put on that.

QOTD: "Peruvia - Hidden high in sparking snow of the Bavarian Alps, this vibrant and diverse country is famed for making goose sausage, torch-skiing at night, and baffling simpletons on MSNBC.

Peruvia, you should know, is not the sort of country you want to visit; their national flag is just a cellphone picture of five drunken Peruvian thugs beating the sh** out of a lost and terrified Belgian motorist. Their national motto is "Learn to Read a Map, Pierre."

The mountain Peruvia sits atop is now called "The Peaceful Alp," because they raided the mountain that was originally called "The Peaceful Alp," murdered them all, and stole their sign." --Ace o' Spades

Sunday, July 28, 2013

As a public service for businesses impacted by Obamacare's Byzantine maze of penalties, fees, taxes, mandates and other regulations that will require you to shed workers, our enterprising Cub Reporter Biff Spackle offers the following Semi-Official Obamacare Pink Slip.

Feel free to reproduce anywhere, anytime as a reminder to the drones that they may want to think before they vote next time around. That is, if there is a next time.

This is a pencil. There isn't a single person in the world who could make this pencil.

The wood from which it was made came from a tree cut down in the state of Washington.

To cut down that tree, it took a saw.

To make that saw, it took steel.

To make that steel, it took iron ore.

The black center of the pencil, which we call 'lead', is actually made from compressed graphite.

It comes from mines in South America.

The eraser, made from rubber, likely comes from Malaysia.

The rubber tree wasn't native to Malaysia. It was imported from South America by businessmen with the help of the British government.

The brass fairing that holds the eraser probably came from the Midwestern United States, where computerized machine tools stamp, roll, finish and convey them.

The yellow paint, the glue that holds it together... literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil.

People who don't speak the same language. Who practice different religions. Who might hate one another if they ever met. When you visit a store and buy this pencil, you are -- in effect -- trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of time from all those thousands of people.

What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil?

There was no "Pencil Czar" sending out orders from Washington. It was the magic of the free market. The impersonal operation of a market system that brought them together and got them to cooperate to make this pencil, so that you could have it for a few pennies.

That is why the free market system is so important to our society. It fosters harmony, cooperation and peaceful interactions between the peoples of the world.

How many of the Democrats' despised "millionaires and billionaires" were created as this pencil came into existence? Do the employees of the steel mill care? The saw manufacturer? The buyer of the pencil? Of course not.

In the formulation of the hard left Democrat party, the manufacture and distribution of pencils would be administered by a "Czar" and a centralized, federal agency. A few masterminds, like Obamacare's health advisory board, would try to manage and control thousands of voluntary, individual interactions. And we know from history that it simply can't be done.

We must call Obama and the Democrats' incessant drive for centralized government -- and their class-warfare rhetoric -- what it is: a new branding of the old Marxist philosophies, i.e., "Progressivism". It's just a different name for the same failed ideology that spreads misery and poverty where ever it is implemented.

The modern Democrat Party should be called what it is: the party of Marx. The Party of Unconstitutionality. The Party of Economic Misery and Failure. And it must be stopped -- quickly -- if this Republic is to survive.

It is nearly impossible to convince people that an economic collapse is likely, perhaps inevitable. It is beyond anything they have seen or can imagine. I attribute that to a normalcy bias, an inherent weakness of experiential learners. For many, accepting something that has not occurred during their time on the planet is not possible. The laws of economics and mathematics may shape history but they are not controlled by history.

The form of cataclysm and its timing is indeterminable. Political decisions continue to shape both. The madmen who are responsible for the coming disaster continue to behave as if they can manage to avoid it. Violating Einstein’s definition of insanity, they continue to apply the same poison that caused the problem. These fools believe they can manage complexities they do not understand. We are bigger fools for providing them the authority to indulge their hubris and wreak such damage.

Apocalypse In One Picture

James Quinn provided the following graph. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this graph is worth millions. The route to economic demise is depicted below:

Cornucopia

Sponsored by: Call Eric Cantor at 804-747-4073 and Paul Ryan at 202-225-3031 and tell them NO AMNESTY!

QOTD: "...Democratic Partisans have grown wealthy off of exploiting the Public Sector, using taxpayer funds to finance their own lives and their corrupt political machine (* especially Union Labor which launders taxpayer money back to the Democrats). Thus like Benghazi, Obama and others simply lie about the reasons for the need to continue to rip off everyone.

Barack Obama has been exposed long ago as being as big of a fraud as the Clintons. He has lied about all, transparency, taxation, lobbyists, rendition, wiretaps, spying, drone assassinations, executive orders, signing statements, war, "no meddling", etc. On top of it all, he is a vicious partisan who is overtly divisive. This is no leader. Even the loftiest vision of 'hope and change' was exposed long ago as nothing more than a cash for clunker - shovel ready flop dedicated to build more roads. It is a tragedy." --Old Fan

Saturday, July 27, 2013

In April, Moody’s Investors Service, a bond rating agency, issued a report identifying 29 municipalities selected for review over concerns of credit-worthiness... Their chief concern: Some municipalities are underreporting pension liabilities; the ways in which those large costs are reported can vary widely from place to place.

...Cities on the list for review aren’t necessarily facing imminent downgrade, though their mere presence on that list makes it more likely... Moody’s, as we speak, is re-examining these nine largest cities...

9. Chicago: ...Moody’s downgraded The Windy City’s credit rating by three notches last week, as a result of $19 billion in unfunded pension debt... [and] mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff, [told] city employees they should sign up for the federal health insurance exchanges. It’s almost as if he might have known the city was running out of money to fund employee health care.

8. Portland, Ore.: Moody’s is reviewing the city’s credit rating for its general obligation bonds, but also for Portland’s tax obligation bonds, housing bonds and redevelopment bonds. The city has more than $453 million in unfunded pension debt... Pew notes Portland “had virtually no asset” to offset unfunded liabilities of $2.3 billion in fiscal 2009 for its pension and disability plan for police and firefighters.

7. Omaha, Neb.: ...has managed to ring up more than $1.4 billion in pension liabilities, and it has only enough cash saved to pay about 43 percent of those costs...

6. Minneapolis: Minneapolis has piled up more than $700 million in unfunded pension liabilities, prompting the ratings agency to take another look at the city...

5. Cincinnati: Moody’s downgraded Cincinnati just last week, after it was placed on the list of possible downgrades in April... The city’s unfunded pension liability tops $700 million.

4. Providence, R.I.: With a funding ratio — the percentage of pension debt versus current assets to pay — of 42 percent, Providence’s pension mess, per capita, is even worse than Chicago’s... But Pew notes Providence has taken some steps in the right direction. The city suspended annual cost-of-living adjustments for retirees and now requires all former workers olden than 65 to switch to Medicare instead of receiving health benefits from the city.

3. Trenton, N.J.: Moody’s is reviewing general obligation bonds issued by Trenton’s public school system. A downgrade on those bonds would follow fast in the footsteps of a citywide downgrade in 2011.

2. Santa Fe, N.M.: In putting Santa Fe “on notice” a few months ago, Moody’s noted the severity of the city’s pension problems. Moody’s ranked the city of Santa Fe as the worst in the country, saying it has net pension liabilities equal to six times its operating revenue.

1. Charleston, W.Va.: ...Charleston has the worst-funded pension system of any major city in the United States, with only 24 percent of the necessary funds to cover more than $337 million in pension debt...

What do all of these cities -- and many, many more -- have in common? The infernal alliance of the Democrat Party and public sector unions.

HHS Office of Inspector General officials say the agency will be significantly restricted in its ability to monitor and address Medicare and Medicaid fraud and abuse within the nation's health care system in the coming years, citing budget and staffing cuts and hiring freezes, according to an internal document obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

The document states, "As OIG's budget resources decline, so do our enforcement and oversight activities," adding that it "will not be able to keep pace" with the expected jump in taxpayer-subsidized health care under the Affordable Care Act, "maintain/expand our highly successful Medicare Fraud Strike Forces, or keep pace with the expected need for growth to combat ongoing health care fraud."

...Other projects that HHS OIG planned for 2013 but have been canceled include:

• An audit of computer systems security for the ACA insurance exchanges;
• An investigation of nursing homes to determine possible overuse of controversial antipsychotic treatments;
• An analysis of efforts by state governments and Medicaid managed care groups to uncover fraud and abuse;
• A probe of pharmaceutical drugs that are being marketed under the Medicare Part D program without FDA's clearance for safety and effectiveness; and
• An investigation into fraudulent suppliers of high-cost durable medical equipment.

The chart above comes to us from the HHS itself (PDF). Its spending goes up every year and includes incredible waste and fraud. The official numbers say the HHS is spending half a billion dollars on "Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control" (up more than double), $289 million on its "headquarters" building and administrative staff (up 50 percent), and another half a billion on a separate "Center for Tobacco Products" (up more than double).

But there's not enough money to secure the private health care information of the American people.

It's never enough. Never. And don't ask how many of these billions of dollars are going into the pockets of public sector union employees who vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Put simply, the federal government is the Democrat Party. They are one and the same. And no amount of taxpayer money will ever be enough.

How many elections does Karl Rove have to lose before he and the rest of the Beltway elites learn that pandering to different ethnic groups is a losing proposition? That liberty, private property rights, low taxes, and economic opportunity resonate with all people, regardless of race, color or religion?

Andy Vidak, the Republican farmer, won the special election runoff for the 16th District Senate seat when his opponent, Democrat Leticia Perez, a Kern County Supervisor, conceded on Wednesday ... Vidak, a working class candidate, resonated with working class Hispanics in the district who also saw how coastal California elites were not putting their bread-and-butter interests first...

Vidak ran broadly on "the bifurcation of California: the coastal liberal elites versus the Valley folks." On a more local level, Vidak's theme of "fish versus farmer" resonated with Democrats in a District where the unemployment rate is 15% and as high as 30% in some communities in the District. Vidak reminded voters that liberal environmentalists, in order to protect fish, only allowed farmers to receive 20% of their water allocation, crippling the region's economy. He also stressed that Perez supported the the state's high-speed rail project that would have razed business, farms, and homes in the District. Because she supported the agenda of coastal elites and Democrat interest groups, Perez was able to raise twice as much money as Vidak, but 16th District voters ultimately rejected her liberal policies.

It is often said that California is a harbinger of things to come for the country. For Republicans looking at California, there has not been much of hope of late, but Vidak's victory could be a sign that areas that have traditionally voted for Democrats may give the right kind of Republican a chance as they see unemployment rates increase and opportunities for upward mobility decrease in their communities.

But apparently this lesson is too difficult for Karl Rove and the rest of the K Street consultant class to grasp.